The Binge Files - Everything you need to know

Heard of The Binge Files? It’s an incredibly in-depth report from Three into the binge-watching habits of Brits (defined here as watching four or more episodes of the same TV show in one sitting).

Packed full of facts and figures, The Binge Files are the result of polling more than 5000 people across the UK, as well as reviewing the usage trends of millions of Three customers.

It makes for compelling reading, revealing not just how much TV we watch, along with when and where we do it, but also looking towards the future, and how Three as a network can help us binge better.

The Binge Files: what Three found

There’s an almost overwhelming number of facts and figures in The Binge Files, which is why we’ve pulled out the key ones so you don’t have to.

Three has found that 45% of 16-34-year-olds binge watch every TV show that they stream, and speaking of streaming, 83% of people in that same age group don’t watch shows live, instead streaming them later (all the better for binge-watching), and 44% of those polled stream more than an hour of content on their phones daily.

As a mobile network, that sort of information is sure to be especially interesting to Three, and one thing you might not have expected is that 72% of those watching on mobile do it at home – which is surprising when you’d have access to other, larger screens at home, but then there is a certain amount of convenience to mobile, as you always have it with you.

And perhaps they also tend to watch at home because 54% of users worry about maxing out their data when binge-watching.

The main thing Three found though, is simply that we love to binge. As the chart above shows well over 50% of younger users binge at least a quarter of the things they watch, and even older users do a lot of binging – though the amount of binge-watching does seem to decrease with age.

We’re getting more into binge-watching every year too, with searches for the term ‘binge-watch’ having quadrupled since 2013.

Why do we Binge?

If there’s one thing responsible for the growth of binge-watching it’s Netflix, and to a lesser extent other streaming services. They’re packed full of content that can be accessed at any time, rather than being a slave to TV schedules, and in many cases whole seasons of shows are added in one go, making it easy to binge.

The Binge Files also notes that services like Netflix automatically start the next episode, so you have to actively stop watching.

And of course, having ever more screens, including mobile ones like smartphones and tablets, means we can watch wherever we happen to be.

The good news is that this binging behaviour might actually be good for us though, with Three finding that 53% of us find binge-watching helps us relax and de-stress, while 10% of us feel binge-watching positively benefits our social lives by giving us things to talk about and shared experiences.

What Three did with its findings

Two of Three’s big findings were that we love to binge, but worry about the amount of data it uses when doing so on mobile. So with that in mind it created Go Binge, which allows Three customers to Binge content from Netflix, TVPlayer, Deezer and SoundCloud without it coming out of their data allowance. So we can binge more, without the worry.

Looking to the future

As we binge more we also desire bigger screens, Three has found, with not just larger TVs increasing in popularity, but also larger phones, such as the 5.8-inch Samsung Galaxy S8.

There’s no sign of that growth slowing down, and the availability of bigger phones is leading to more people watching on mobile - 65% of 16-34-year-olds say they now watch more on mobile than they did 18 months ago.

4G has helped too, offering faster mobile data, and with more mobile watching our viewing habits have also changed, pushed towards shorter content like YouTube videos, and even pushing people to create their own content using the cameras on their phones.

So it seems phones are increasingly the present and future of binge-watching, and with the likes of Go Binge, Three is positioned to make the most of that.